


The better days of life were ours

by Ceose



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, I Don't Even Know, all my feels!, canon character death, i'm blaming other people, scott makes me want to hit him in the head, sheriff stilinski also makes me want to cry, stiles makes me want to cry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-18
Updated: 2012-06-18
Packaged: 2017-11-08 00:32:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceose/pseuds/Ceose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is nine when he learns about cancer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The better days of life were ours

**Author's Note:**

> This is all because of shutupbolinksi on tumblr (http://shutupbolinski.tumblr.com/post/25121766622/just-think-about-this). I'm serious. We aren't friends or anything. I just like to tumblr stalk people.
> 
> I looked up popular Kurdish names for Momma!Stilinsky. It means illuminated and is an Iranian-Kurdish feminine name. According to the internet.
> 
> No beta, please point out any mistakes.

When Stiles is nine he learns about cancer. He learns about the way it eats you up from the inside and you wear the marks of war on your skin. The other side of that, though, is that he learns how to fight the things you might not win against. At nine Stiles learns to be strong; to smile through the pain, to laugh through the sickness. At nine Stiles learns how to win against the unbeatable.

At twelve he learns that wars leave marks behind you can't see. He learns that cancer leaves minefields hidden throughout the ravaged landscape of his mother. Stiles learns that the first battle is sometimes years before the second, that the first is sometimes just a means to an end.

At twelve he learns about the stink of dying, the pain of loss, the grief of everything being burned out of you.

Rounak Stilinski. May she rest in peace for ever after this war.

Stiles spends the summer after his mother dies hiding in the police station while his father works. He sits in the hard chairs of the lobby, the soft chairs of the break room, the chair behind his father's desk and he waits for his dad to tell him it's time to go home to a house that is empty of what they both need the most. They eat casseroles made by the woman of the neighborhood that taste like pity and sadness with an apple pie dessert that tastes like a second hand copy of something he once loved. 

Stiles is twelve and has nightmares of his dad dying and leaving him alone in a house of memories. He goes to the grocery store they always shopped at and sees all these things that she would buy and he can't breathe with how unfair it is, how unkind it is, how much he aches for what is lost.

Stiles turns thirteen and goes on a pill a day diet that keeps him calm. That keeps him from the panic of his mother being gone somewhere he won't be able to touch for years.

And years. And years. Years that he watches his dad just cover his grief with the problems of the town. Where they don't talk about the guest room that has all her clothes still hanging in the closet waiting to be worn. Her dresses and shirts and sweaters. Years where Stiles finds other ways to cope inside of his pill inspired calmness. 

It takes Stiles one year to realize that a boy that smiles is a boy that is looked over. A boy that's happy is the boy that everyone wants and so he smiles. He smiles so wide it hurts, a smile so wide people make comments about how nice it is. He fakes it til he makes it and if he never really gets there no one has to know.

That's also the year that he finds Scott. They bond over being the only child of a single parent that is at work more than they are home. Of being the outcasts of the classroom. Of being the last picked for any team. That hole inside Stiles is never filled but Scott helps him with the jagged edges. He helps smooth them out and make them even. 

Stiles gets better, slowly, and eventually his smile is real again.

Then Scott changes into something new and amazing. Something otherworldly and doesn't need Stiles anymore. Not like he did. Not like when they were both alone with no one else. Stiles gets left for Alison, gets left for dead, and the hole his mother carved out of him when she died is made even wider with Scott and his slow, steady abandonment. 

So Stiles does everything he possibly can to keep Scott close. He researches. He hunts down books to read. He does everything he knows how to do and then he does more because the last thing his mother taught him was that just because you don't think you'll win doesn't mean you stop trying. The war is over when you stop fighting and a Stilinski doesn't stop until the last breath is gone from them. If Stiles is anything he's the best and worst of both his parents which means that he won't stop until he's dead but he's stubborn enough to make that last breath the longest he's ever had.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair by Lord Byron.


End file.
